Tall Tales and Tittle-Tattle: The Homeric Riddle (extract)

The Homeric Riddle

An anonymous work from the time of Emperor Trajan, called Of the Origin of Homer and Hesiod, and of their Contest, does its best to clear up some of the endless mysteries surrounding the two great poets. Even then, however, nobody knew who Homer really was, or where he came from; cities all over Greece claimed him as one of their own. As Of the Origin relates, Homer himself did not know his birthplace or his family. He once stopped at Delphi to see if the Oracle could enlighten him, and he was told `The isle of Ios is your mother's country and it shall receive you dead; but beware the riddles of young children.'

As an old man, while wandering the Greek lands as a minstrel, he happened to visit that island, and while sitting on the shore one day he met some sons of fishermen coming back from the sea and asked them what they had caught. They replied:

While Homer was trying to puzzle that out, he remembered the oracle (finally!) and knew his time was up. After composing his own epitaph, and presumably still distracted trying to figure out the answer to the riddle, he slipped and bumped his head.

This kind of riddle has been rattling round the world ever since, and it still turns up in varying shapes and guises. here’s one of the best, with a different answer:

(What the fisher boys caught was lice. As for the Maltese and Sicilian versions, the answer, of course, is ‘snot’.)

The Postman’s Marathon

The ancient Greeks thrived on competition, and of all the sporting events that crowded their calendar, the quadrennial Olympic games were the most prestigious. They were so important that their foundation date, 776 bc, was the beginning of the Greek calender; years were reckoned according to the games: ‘in the third year of the 80th Olympiad’. Greek athletes from all across the Mediterranean gathered at Olympia to wrestle, box, run, jump and race chariots until ad 392, when the emperor Theodosius banned the games, along with every whiff of paganism.

Western civilization would remain free of unholy athleticism until the 19th century, when schools began to revive the ancient Greek system that combined academic and physical education. At the same time, archaeologists began to turn up the ruins of ancient Olympia from under their thick mantle of mud. In the general enthusiasm, it occurred to Baron Pierre de Coubertin, secretary of the Union of French Societies of Athletic Sports, that the ban on the games had probably lasted long enough, and he set about organizing the first Olympiad in 1503 years. In honour of their Greek origins, the 1896 games took place in Athens (Olympia itself, the first choice for the venue, was deemed too remote and undeveloped). More than once, Greek political instablity and the financial burden threatened to derail Coubertin’s baby until Georgios Averoff, a wealthy Alexandrian Greek, stepped in and donated a million drachmae for a new 70,000 seat marble Kallimarmaro stadium, built in 18 months on the site of Athens’ ancient stadium.

It hosted 175 athletes from a dozen countries: Greece (with the most participants by far), the United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Austria, Australia, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Sweden and Chile. They participated in 43 events in track and field, plus swimming, fencing, shooting, tennis, weightlifting, Greco-Roman wrestling, cycling and gymnastics—bad weather cancelled the planned sailing and rowing races. Most of the athletes paid their own way; some had been sent over by athletic clubs, while others were tourists who just happened to be in Athens at the time. From all accounts, even if the competition wasn’t always up to the highest standards, the enthusiasm of the athletes and spectators, more than anything, convinced the new International Olympic Committee that they were on to a good thing.

The event everyone remembered from 1896 was the marathon, re-invented for the occasion. Because the games took place in Athens, a Frenchman, Michel Breal, had the idea of repeating the legendary 26-mile run of Pheidippides in 490 bc from Marathon to Athens to relay the glad tidings that the Athenians had defeated the Persians. It had been ancient Athens’ finest hour, and there was much hope in 1896 that one of the 21 Greeks would triumph over the Frenchman, Hungarian, American and Australian who had entered the race. Rumours flew that Averoff would give his daughter in marriage to a Greek winner, that he would become rich overnight, or at least have a lifetime supply of clothes, bread and wine—as in ancient times, when one of the perks of winning the Olympics was a lifetime meal ticket from the folks back home.

As in ancient times, the race would start at Marathon, at 2 pm on a hot April afternoon; it soon saw the Frenchman, Australian and American in the lead. Jogging behind them, in fourth place, ran No. 17, Spiros Louis, a shepherd who had become the postman and part-time water carrier in the Athenian suburb of Maroussi, and who had trained for the event by running alongside his mules. Cheering spectators lined the course, while 70,000 waiting in the stadium in Athens anxiously flipped their worry beads. Soldiers on horseback provided both crowd control and showed the way to Athens, while following the pack were doctors and nurses in horse-drawn carts, followed by two undertakers—after all, Pheidippides was supposed to have keeled over and died on arrival after panting: ‘Nenikíamen!’ (‘We won!’)

Unfamiliarity with the course and distance proved the downfall of the French leader, who was an hour in front of the field when he collapsed from heat exhaustion. Louis, meanwhile, kept up an even pace, stopping frequently at the drink stands along the road, downing a half pint of wine at a time, assuring his supporters that all was going ‘according to plan’. At the 20 mile mark, a particularly dry stretch of road, the American and Australian, running side by side, were overwhelmed by the clouds of dust kicked up by the soldiers’ horses, leaving No. 17 on his own in front.

The last word that had been relayed to Athens, however, was that the Australian was leading—until the leader of the escort party dramatically rode into the stadium and announced the Louis was coming in first. The crowd went wild, sobbing and singing the national anthem, and as No. 17 appeared, women cast jewellery at this feet, and, according to some accounts, the King of Greece leapt out of his box to run at his side around the last lap. Louis’ winning time was 2 hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds, and although he didn’t really wed Mlle Averoff, he was a national hero and later bore the flag for the Greek delegation in the 1936 Olympics.

During the farewell banquet, King George proposed making Athens the permanent home of the games, but Coubertin and his committee stuck to their original idea of holding the 1900 Olympics in Paris, leaving a frustated Athens to wait until 2004 for another chance.

The Streets of Baltimore

Never a man to follow the habits of more serene and conventional poets, Edgar Allan Poe wrote his last work ten years after he died. The Streets of Baltimore appeared in a New York newspaper in 1859; it was claimed to have been sent by the poet’s shade through a medium at a seance. Ascribed to Poe, or more commonly to ‘Anon.’, most good old-fashioned anthologies of American poetry have carried it since.

Whoever wrote it, the poem does paint an eerily plausible picture of the poet’s last hours, walking those lively streets on an early autumn day in 1849. No one knows what Poe was up to in Baltimore, and no one knows for sure how he met his end. Poe left his home in Richmond, Virgina for the last time on 27. September 1849, headed for Philadelphia, where he had arranged to edit an acquaintance’s volume of poetry. Often, in his travels, he would stop over in his old home town, where he still had many friends and relations. This time, he does not seem to have contacted any of them. Poe had a famous drink problem, and there is a suggestion that he fell off the wagon again here; Baltimore has always been a good place for that. But nothing is known of his movements until 3. October, when a doctor friend named Snodgrass received a note from another doctor:

‘There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance’.

Snodgrass found Poe delirious, and incapable of explaining what had happened to him. He was taken to the hospital, where he died four days later. No autopsy was performed, and the doctor in charge wrote only that the deceased suffered from ‘congestion of the brain’.

It was only natural for the father of the detective story to leave a little mystery for his fans to ponder. Since 1849, Poe’s death has supported a prosperous cottage industry among writers, academics and doctors with a literary bent. Their theories mention alcoholic dehydration, carbon monoxide poisoning, diabetes, delirium tremens, dipsomania, epilepsy, hypoglycemia, porphyria, rabies, toxic shock and murder. Any of these may have played a role, or any combination of them, but their scenarios commonly overlook the most important fact of all. In Baltimore, 3. October 1849 was an election day.

‘Ryan’s polling place’, like most all the polling places in Baltimore, would have been a bar, a widespread custom that dated from colonial days. The taverns served as headquarters for political clubs, and the tavernkeepers themselves were commonly the political fixers: brokering votes, or creating them, plotting tactics, and mobilizing street muscle for whatever was required. Baltimore was no sissy town. When its Chamber of Commerce men dreamed up the nickname ‘Charm City’ over a century ago, they were hoping to replace the moniker by which everyone already knew it—’Mob City’. America’s second-largest at the time, Baltimore had made its fortune smuggling and buccaneering in the Revolution and the War of 1812, when it single-handedly turned back the British Empire, in the famous fight around Fort McHenry that occasioned the writing of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. After the war Baltimore sent clipper ships as far as China, and it financed and built America’s first railroad, the B&O.

For all its achievements, though, and its reputation for culture and mellow good living, this boomtown seemed to be turning out terribly wrong. By 1849, Baltimore politics teetered on the verge of violent anarchy. In this corner, we have the Democratic Party, friend of the working man and the immigrant (read Oirish), supported on the streets by the Bloody Eights, the Bloats, the Butt-Enders, the Gumballs, the Peelers, the Pluckers, the Double Pumps and the Calithumpians. In the opposite corner sits the Native American, waiting for a new political party and in the meantime polishing up his street tactics. In times of duress, he could call on the talents of the Blood Tubs, the Rip Raps, the Rough Skins, the Wampanoags and the Plug-Uglies.

Many of these gangs were identified with a volunteer fire company. In all the big cities, these, along with the tavernkeepers, had become arbiters of public affairs, and occasionally they made themselves the biggest nuisances in town. Fire insurance companies paid the company that put a fire out, so competition was fierce. Now and then a partisan who arrived at a fire before his company might cut the hoses or spook the horses to sabotage a rival; if two arrived at the same time there might be a general brawl in the street while the building burned merrily down. Some companies were not above starting fires themselves when business was slow. Each company maintained a Liberty Pole in front of its lair; its height was a measure of a company’s status, and the greatest shame would be to let a rival burn it down. Politicians got their starts in the companies, like New York’s matchless Boss Tweed, an old fire laddie who gave Tammany Hall its tiger symbol—the tiger had been painted on his company’s engine, and everyone in New York knew it well.

When that new party, the Nativists’ great hope, finally arrived, it wasn’t really a party at all—more of an underground conspiracy. Secret orders grew up everywhere, in forms that would later be copied by the Ku Klux Klan. The most powerful, a coordinating group for the rest, was the ‘Order of the Star-Spangled Banner’. All their members were initiated and sworn to secrecy, hence the nickname by which we know them today—the Know-Nothings.

Poe only saw the beginning of it. In the 1850’s the boys got entirely out of hand. The Blood Tubs, made up of butchers and their apprentices, got the name from their tradition of keeping a tub of pigs’ blood at the polls, to duck in anybody vulgar enough to try and vote for the opposition. Beyond doubt, the most spectacularly psychotic gang in American urban history was Baltimore’s Plug-Uglies. Most of these came from the leather trades, and carried awls. To ‘plug’ someone ‘ugly’ meant a direct shot of the awl, held with its handle in the fist, into the solar plexus. Before elections the Plug-Uglies would parade through the streets with their weapons, carrying banners proclaiming ‘The Awl is Useful in the Hands of an Artist’.

‘Cooping’, a political term familiar enough to appear in American dictionaries of the time, meant the process by which political gangs would find a vulnerable gentleman, especially one with a weakness for drink, and shanghai him a day or two before an election. They would liquor him up, or dope him up, and lay on a couple of nice dinners; come election day, the coopee would be frog-marched around all the polling places, or at least all the ones controlled by the right party; once the round was completed they’d change his clothes, trim his moustaches, and do it all again. The faster they shifted him, the more votes they could pile up; it must have been exhausting, and the poor soul’s handlers no doubt kept him just sober enough to walk.

Poe was always a natty dresser, but when his friend Snodgrass found him he was wearing a very cheap suit that didn’t seem to belong to him. That’s the giveaway; in all likelihood, Edgar Allan Poe got voted to death.

© Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls